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That's right, Asylum fans, as another year draws to a close, it's time to look back over the last 12 months to determine our favorites among the year's harvest. I'm talking, of course, about the nominees for the 2nd Annual Looney Awards for Excellence in Asylum Films.

Invented by yours truly, the Loonies are an entirely fan-voted awards presentation across myriad categories celebrating the very best in The Asylum films of 2011. And this year has produced a lot of competition: 16 films hit DVD in 2011, up from 12 in 2010.

The deal is simple: below you will find nominees in 12 categories; all 16 films have been nominated for Best Feature (14 and 2, really, but you'll see), but in subsequent categories, the number of nominees drop, making those represented truly the creme de la creme. Write-in candidates are of course welcome.

The voting period will last for six weeks, giving you plenty of time to catch up on any films or performances you might have inadvertently missed, and will close on Wednesday, February 8nd, 2011. Winners will be announced right heretwo days later, on Friday the 10th.

So email your votes to AsylumLoonies@hotmail.com and let your voice be heard, nay, counted! All these fine films are available on DVD for your screening purposes, and all can be acquired by a quick trip to The Asylum site, or Netflix. Vote once, but vote wise: winners will receive the undying admiration of we the committed, plus the worldwide esteem and jealous respect of their peers that comes with being a Looney-Award Winning Actor, Actress, Writer, Director, Non-Human, et cetera.

Good luck to all of the nominees, and now, without further adieu, your 2011 Looney Nominees:

For the first time maybe ever, today marks the release of not one, but TWO new Asylum movies on DVD: Zombie Apocalypse and The Amityville Haunting.

Zombie Apocalypse - written by Craig Engler and Brooks Peck and directed by Nick Lyon - is about pretty much what the title would lead you to expect: a group of survivors in a zombie wasteland try and fight their way to salvation. The film stars Ving Rhames, Taryn Manning, Gerald Webb, Lesley Ann-Brandt and scores more, and did right well in its World Premiere on SyFy back in October.

And then there's The Amityville Haunting, the latest found-footage project from the studio, this time concerning an ill-fated family that chose the wrooooong house to move into.

Both of these films are definitely worth a watch - Zombie Apocalypse boasts some of the best effects, writing and acting the studio's ever put out there, and Amityville Haunting will scare the living crap out of you, believe me. Jump to the links above for more info, including production stills and trailers, then go wherever you go to procure DVDs these days and get your hands on this fun and frightening double feature.

Today the fine folks over at The Asylum revealed the poster for their next sex farce, Celebrity Sex Tape:

Pretty standard poster, white background a la all Asylum comedy posters, and plenty of titillating promise. In case you forgot, this is the premise:

A group of college nerds secretly record a washed up celebrity having sex and post the tape on the internet. When the publicity revives the actress's career, every B-list celebrity, reality show reject, and celebutante in Hollywood want to star in the guys next "production."

There's nothing like a good scare for Christmas, I always say, and this year The Asylum has given us just that with The Amityville Haunting, on DVD this coming Tuesday, the 27th.The studio's fifth found-footage film (behind Monster, Paranormal Entity, 8213 Gacy House and Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes), this one is a collection of home movies from and featuring the Benson family, who early last year moved into a house where 20 years earlier, a man named Robert Defeo Jr. murdered his whole family by shooting them each in the head. You'd think your Realtor would be required to tell you stuff like that. Nope, not if it happened more than three years ago. This is why they make ghost detection apps for iPhone and Android; just sayin' people, you gotta learn to take some spectral responsibility...

Anywho, as I don't like to give away any spoilers in my notes, and as found-footage films are pretty much twist after twist after twist, anything specific you say is giving away something, so I will comment only generally. Think of the film like Anneliese meets Paranormal Entity, a family in conflict with a deeper, darker power than they could have conceived of. The footage is raw, gruesome in spots, and guaranteed to make you jump. Things move very quickly here - only a month after moving in was the Benson Footage discovered - and get real weird real fast; there's a lot of supernatural activity going on in this house - I'd tell you not to blink or you'll miss some of the subtler notes, but I don't think you'll be blinking much. My only advice is to remember to breathe, otherwise, you're gonna pass out like seven minutes in.

If I'm honest, found-footage films aren't necessarily my cup of tea, not because I think they're overdone or anything like that, I just like a little more story than most of them provide. But The Amityville Haunting has a tangible and engaging narrative running through it; the film does not feel like a patchwork of random yet similar events, but rather a skillfully sewn together storyline that mounts in intensity from the first frame to a gut-wrenching crescendo 90 minutes later. Whoever The Asylum got to arrange this one did a bang-up job.

So bottom line, if you enjoy found-footage films, or just horror in general, guaranteed The Amityville Haunting has something that will make you scream. It's a fast-paced, fright-filled story sure to generate some uncomfortable empathy with the afflicted Benson family. It will also teach you to bone up on the history of buildings you consider buying to store your family in, and to maybe not move to notoriously haunted towns. Again, just sayin'...

In all Asylum movies, there is an enemy to be defeated. Sometimes that enemy is a monstrous creature running amok in a populous area; sometimes it's a crazed genius at the helm of a fiendish plot for world domination/destruction; sometimes it's a psycho or a supernatural being with a penchant for nubile women; sometimes it's an extraterrestrial lifeform or object whose arrival spells doom; and sometimes, in the cases of films like The 18 Year Old Virgin and Barely Legal, it is that most heinous of curses, the most affronting of affronts - your virginity.

In both these films - both written, by the way, by Naomi Selfman - and many other teenage sex comedies, virginity is a thing that must be slain, a thing to purge oneself of in order to insure normal, healthy personal development, and of course, lots of sex. In most creature features, this is the part where I would describe the creature in question, it's schematics and parameters, abilities and weaknesses; that's a little hard to do with virginity - it's just a thing about you that's there until it isn't, and getting rid of it, "killing" it, if you will, is relatively easy, depending on how you rate a variety of factors including appearance, willingness, standards and proximity to partners with comparable ratings. Yet it remains a hard and fast (pardon the pun) tenet of young adulthood: getting laid ain't easy. Even if, if 18 Year Old Virgin and Barely Legal are to be believed, you're a smoking hot chick.

In both films, women decide their still-intact virginities need to be done away with at the very first legal opportunity, their 18th birthdays. All sorts of sexy hi-jinks ensue in their quest to obtain a dong for the deed, and in the end, it's realized that sex and love, while of course highly compatible, can come separately with varying degrees of physical and emotional satisfaction. But they still hit it, so, problem solved.

Losing one's virginity, to some people, could be considered the most significant rite of passage there is; it certainly cannot be argued by anyone, no matter their beliefs, that it is one of the more intensely personal experiences a person can go through, and thus it is to be expected that pursuing this experience can sometimes reach fervent heights. That's why we have these movies, not to mention American Pie, The Last American Virgin, Losin' It, Porky's, Superbad, The Virginity Hit, Can't Hardly Wait,Twilight and, of course, The 40 Year Old Virgin. The conclusion? Virginity is to comedies as Nazis are to war movies: the ultimate villain.

Ooh, pitch idea: Virgins at the Center of the Earth, a sort of Vernesian Blue Lagoon/Land of the Lost thing about college kids on a church trip - the whole purity-ring crowd - whose bus falls into a crevice opened by a localized earthquake. Instead of dying in a fiery blaze as logic would dictate, they fall into an inner-earth paradise from which they can't escape. As the months wear on, the promises of the surface world fall away as passions flare. But you know, funny.

The story here isn't so much the impetus for this post as much as the concept of the critter at the center of it is.

Seems down in the beleaguered Gulf of Mexico, shrimpers and oystermen are having a bit of a problem, and this time it isn't BP's fault: giant shrimp known as Black Tiger Shrimp are eating up their potential catches. Like I said, the story isn't the thing, it's this guy:

Okay, so, that fella, by the ruler he sleeps next to, is 12 inches long; imagine if those inches were feet. Then it isn't other shrimp this bad boy's chomping on, it's bigger fish, sharks, dolphins, small whales, small boats, personal watercraft and definitely every single human being it comes across. And oh yeah, they're not rogue creatures, they travel in schools. Current estimates are of 1,000 or more in the Gulf alone. So...yeah.

But how in the world would they evolve to such a size? That's just ridiculous.

That's where BP comes back into the picture. What if the oil spill was done intentionally to cover up another kind of spill? Say of some government-designed growth hormone meant to plump our seafood supplies into the 22nd Century? And say rather than the normal dose, a dose 1,000,000 times that was released into the ocean just as a school of Black Tiger Shrimp were swimming by? What do you suppose would happen then? TOTAL SHRIMPDEMONIUM!

So then the concept is sound, or sound enough for 90 minutes on SyFy, and now the only question is, who's gonna handle this shrimp problem? Shrimpers, of course, good old down-home boys, men of the marsh, stubbled hard drinkers with rock-solid work ethics and hearts of gold. You gotta have John Schneider in this one, you just gotta. And the dude who played Bubba Gump as his first mate, or whatever shrimpers call the right-hand guy. Throw in Lea Thompson as his wife, a teenage kid or two who's off with friends on a pleasurecraft when the shrimp attack, and you got yourself a freakin' movie.

Here at Committed, I'm always looking for ways to prolong my love affair with Asylum blogging. I've done inmate profiles - spotlights on Asylum personnel - and I've done pitches - shameless attempts to get hired in marketing/development - but now, I'm melding the best of these features into one, amalgamated column: the awkwardly-named Asylum Should-Stars, in which I present actors/actresses/other cultural figures I think would make lovely additions to the Asylum's stable of performers. More mindless fun to wile away your workday! Let's dive right in, shall we?

Name: Keri Lynn Pratt

Best Known For:Cruel Intentions 2, The Smokers, A Single Man, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, various TV.

Could Be Cast As: for my money, Ms. Pratt is a sort of younger DeeDee Pfeiffer: beautiful, talented, sweet and sincere but with an underlying sassiness that needs to be brought to light. I see a brilliant but hare brained physicist, astronomer or geologist in her future.

Name: Michael Des Barres

Best Known For: playing MacGyver's nemesis Murdock, Sugar Town, "Melrose Place" and pretty much every show on network television in the 1980's; also a bitchin' rock star, in his day.

Usually Plays: with a mug like his, Des Barres typically inhabits the wealthy, megalomanical, evil-genius sort, or at least corrupt titans of industry.Could Be Cast As: usually I like to suggest roles against the grain, but Des Barres is so good at what he does - being slickly, charmingly evil, that it would be a shame to change things up. There's a role for this guy in every Asylum movie, just plug him in and watch him go.

Name: Grace Zabriskie

Best Known For: "Twin Peaks," "Big Love," Wild at Heart, An Officer and a Gentleman

Usually Cast As: wiry older women, usually a bit crazy or malevolent, or both. No one does violently frazzledlike Laura Palmer's mom.

Could Be Cast As: surely Mark Atkins has a fantasy epic planned in which she could play an aging queen or wicked sorceress. Or what about the backwoods mother of a serial killer, a kind of actual Mother Bates?

The story here isn't so much the impetus for this post as much as the concept of the critter at the center of it is.

Seems down in the beleaguered Gulf of Mexico, shrimpers and oystermen are having a bit of a problem, and this time it isn't BP's fault: giant shrimp known as Black Tiger Shrimp are eating up their potential catches. Like I said, the story isn't the thing, it's this guy:

Okay, so, that fella, by the ruler he sleeps next to, is 12 inches long; imagine if those inches were feet. Then it isn't other shrimp this bad boy's chomping on, it's bigger fish, sharks, dolphins, small whales, small boats, personal watercraft and definitely every single human being it comes across. And oh yeah, they're not rogue creatures, they travel in schools. Current estimates are of 1,000 or more in the Gulf alone. So...yeah.

But how in the world would they evolve to such a size? That's just ridiculous.

That's where BP comes back into the picture. What if the oil spill was done intentionally to cover up another kind of spill? Say of some government-designed growth hormone meant to plump our seafood supplies into the 22nd Century? And say rather than the normal dose, a dose 1,000,000 times that was released into the ocean just as a school of Black Tiger Shrimp were swimming by? What do you suppose would happen then? TOTAL SHRIMPDEMONIUM!

So then the concept is sound, or sound enough for 90 minutes on SyFy, and now the only question is, who's gonna handle this shrimp problem? Shrimpers, of course, good old down-home boys, men of the marsh, stubbled hard drinkers with rock-solid work ethics and hearts of gold. You gotta have John Schneider in this one, you just gotta. And the dude who played Bubba Gump as his first mate, or whatever shrimpers call the right-hand guy. Throw in Lea Thompson as his wife, a teenage kid or two who's off with friends on a pleasurecraft when the shrimp attack, and you got yourself a freakin' movie.

Big day today, not only do we get Nazis at the Center of the Earth stills, now we have cast, crew and plot details for American Battleship!

We already knew the film was being directed by Thunder Levin, the writer behind this year's 200MPH, but now we know the story he's working with:

"When a fleet of mysterious ships wage war against the Earth, only the crew of the USS Iowa, the last American battleship, can prevent global armageddon."

Pretty cool plot, loosely tied in to the Peter Berg Battleshipout this summer. The real cool stuff here is the casting; dig: Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City, bitches) and Carl Weathers (don't make me tell you), as well as JoHanna Watts, best know for Mutant Vampire Zombies From the 'Hood, also written and directed by Thunder Levin.

Side note, this one was filmed way across the country off the coast of my home state, North Carolina. I don't really have a point here - we have good battleship water? - I just wanted to shout out NC. Hold 'em, Heels.

Back to the matter at hand, all in all, this makes for a pretty rad action/sci-fi flick. Now all we have to do is wait until May 15th, 2012 to see it...

Oh happy, happy Friday! Seems everyone's favorite independent studio just wrapped production this week on what is sure to be one of 2012's most hotly-anticipated films, and a contender for best film title ever, Nazis at the Center of the Earth. Well, now we get a look at the first round of stills from the set, and man oh man oh man does this one look every bit as awesome as its promise.

The film stars Dominique Swain, Christopher Carl Johnson, Lilian Bowden, Josh Allen and the always wonderful Jake Busey, and is directed by first-time helmer and The Asylum's in-house VFX supervisor Joseph Lawson, from a script by Asylum producer Paul Bales, who also wrote Sherlock Holmes and 2010: Moby Dick.

So go, now, and dig on these excellent stills, then try not to pass out holding your breath for the film's release, April 24th, 2012.

I do actually watch other movies, usually at least one a day, and some of them even spent time in a theater. So, in an effort to give you a broader sampling of my taste, I present My Nine Favorite (Non-Asylum) Films of 2011, in alphabetical order. Why only nine, you ask, why not ten? Truthfully, I don't watch a lot of current films, most of my viewing selections go back a few decades, so nine was all I could come up with. Here we go...

Attack the Blockwritten and directed by Joe Cornish

I don't typically go in for alien invasion stories, but this one gripped me from frame one; also has the most interesting internal vocabulary since A Clockwork Orange

Bellflowerwritten and directed by Evan Glodell

Like Before Sunrise for the amateur-flamethrowing/binge-drinking set. Glodell, who also stars, might be the most likable guy of the year; I wanna get totally wasted with this dude and blow shit up.

They don't make as many redneck/religio-thrillers like they did back in the 70's - Race the Devil etc - but thank god Todd Farmer fixed that; plus, the best sex scene since...well, since ever.

Drivewritten by Hossein Amini based on the book by James Sallisdirected by Nicholas Winding Refn

There's no one cooler than Ryan Gosling this year, except maybe Nicholas Refn. This one's like a Jim Thompson story on meth, and it's got Albert Brooks. Albert Brooks!

Rise of the Planet of the Apeswritten by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silverdirected by Rupert Wyatt

I'm a big-time, life-long P.O.T.A. fan, and this revamp pumped fresh blood in the franchise and all but eliminated the nasty taste still lingering in my mouth from the whole Tim Burton-Marky Mark debacle. Intense, cerebral, touching, and this from a guy who hates James Franco.

Rubberwritten and directed by Quentin Dupieux

This one makes no apologies for what it is: a totally absurd, illogical and hella fun monster movie. But the monster's, you know, an old tire. If I was this inventive, I'd never leave the house.

Super 8written and directed by J.J. Abrams

This is the sort of movie that if it had come out when I was 10 or 11, it would have changed my life. As it is, this might be the most fun my brain had with a movie this year. Pure spectacle on every level, and it works.

Superwritten and directed by James Gunn

Not only is this a brilliant, real-life take on the superhero movie craze, it's also, oddly enough, one of the most touching and endearing films I saw in 2011. Rainn Wilson is more than just a funnyman, he is a titan, and James Gunn is a fucking rock star in my book.

With the shortage of video stores in our country at present, locating older Asylum titles on DVD without buying them can be kinda tricky. Fortunately for us, we have the SyFy network, which is constantly scheduling one Asylum flick or another, including many of the studio's staples, those older films that helped pave the way for the triumphant productions they're unleashing these days. Below, please find a schedule of Asylum movies on SyFy for the rest of this month, and next month, including an all-Asylum afternoon triple feature on January 22nd, a Sunday. This isn't a post I make often, and if ever you're curious as to what if any Asylum films will be gracing the small screen soon, jump over to The Asylum's website, where they always have a schedule up on the right side of their homepage. All times are Eastern Standard. Happy viewing!

There are still two Asylum films slated for release in 2011 - Zombie Apocalypse and Amityville Haunting - but already the studio's 2012 slate is filling up quick: 2 Headed Shark Attack, Air Collision, Celebrity Sex Tape, Nazis at the Center of the Earth and Battleships are already in production or in post. But the film I think a lot of people are super-excited for is Grimm's Snow White, a creepier, more creature-centric look at one of the world's most homogenized (and thus in dire need of a reworking such as this) fairy tales.

In the plot description, "ferocious reptile beasts" are said to play a major role and now, courtesy of the fine, fine folks over at The Asylum, I have a very brief clip of the film's opening VFX sequence. Dig it:

Pretty, pretty, pretty rad stuff here. That thing looks like a mega-komodo (TM) with a longer, more versatile neck. Joseph Lawson - who is directing for the first tome in 2012, Nazis at the Center of the Earth - and The Asylum's VFX team have been blowing it up this year. I know I say that every opportunity I get, so if it's getting old, too bad, because the team just keeps giving me opportunities. With a script by Naomi Selfman (MSvC, MPvG), direction from Rachel Goldenberg (Sherlock Holmes) and visual effects like these, you can bet this is not your little sister's Snow White.

If ever there was a time that we faithfully-committed needed to come together and unify our voices, it is now.

Almost a month ago, The Asylum threw down a simple but AMAZING gauntlet: if their Twitter account hit 3,000 followers by December 31st, 2011, they would greenlight MEGA SHARK 3 for production. MEGA SHARK 3. As an Asylum fan, there should be no sweeter three-word phrase in this or any other language.

At present, however, their follower count stands at only 1,246, which is 1,754 followers away from our 3K goal, and we have only 22 days left to hit it.

So take to the web, dear friends, blow up your own Twitter accounts, your Facebooks, your Google+'s, your blogs and webpages, message boards, forums, wherever you go online where there are other people, you need to let them know to follow The Asylum and help bring about the greatest third-installment to a shark franchise ever (sorry Jaws 3D). And don't stop at the web. Back in the day, we used to talk to people face-to-face, and though out-dated, you still have the technology to do so. Tell your neighbors, your mailman, your grocer, your in-laws, that dick at work, your bartender, definitely your weed-dealer, people walking their dogs or pushing babies, anyone with ears and a computer.

This is a rare and spectacular opportunity; are we just going to sit around idly and let it pass us by? HELL NO.You got two options, as I see it: you can spread this post and it's call to duty like you would Mononucleosis at a high-school make-out party and help contribute to what is easily one of the most important cultural movements of our generation, or you can sit on your ass and let other companies make crappy shark movies to fill that deep, black void inside you. Which sounds better, Cheeto-fingers?

As a special incentive - and I don't know if you'll think it's special, but I would, if it wasn't about me - if The Asylum does hit 3K followers by 12/31/11, I'll select one of those followers at random and mail you an autographed copy (autographed by me, unfortunately, so the resale value is nil) of 2 Headed Shark Attack when it comes out on DVD at the end of January. Just think! A copy of the greatest 2-headed anything film ever autographed by a low-level contributor! How B-awesome is that?